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For Grimsahw, various “ways of seeing” have structured anthropological thought and practice. She argues that vision operates differently in anthropology depending on conversations of technique or knowledge production. Ultimately, Grimsahw asks what’s the relationship of vision to ethnographic methods/techniques and epistemological inquires? In the early European projects of ethnography, seeing was the central mode of the practice. Grimshaw states there was an ocularcentric bias. Ethnographers were encouraged to go “see” for themselves (7).

Grimshaw takes us through many rises and falls of the visual from a standpoint of anthropology, here I highlight two chapters: In the chapter “Cinema and anthropology in the postwar world,” Grimshaw explores cinema’s various responses to a changing world. A world situated between two hegemonic forces (think Cold War), but also a world where “popular democratic movements” (71) were taking shape across much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The focus on the individual, then, in its various forms became the centerpiece of modern cinema.